Un chien andalou (1929)
Directed by Luis Buñuel

Film Review

Cinema has often been likened to a dream experience but in his first film Luis Buñuel delivers precisely that, a baffling succession of stark and surreal images that resolutely defies a rational interpretation. Even the title, Un chien andalou, is an enigma and appears not to have the slightest connection with what the film shows. In collaboration with Salvador Dalí, one of the greatest of the Surrealist painters, Buñuel constructs a unique piece of film art that is as mesmeric as it is shocking, brilliantly bizarre and inexplicably enthralling.  It is a film that was conceived as a full-frontal assault on the sterile bourgeois conventions that its creators detested and has become a kind of torch bearer for the independent filmmaker ever since.  Oh, and it is definitely not one for the squeamish.

Buñuel first had the idea for Un chien andalou when he was working as an assistant to Jean Epstein on La Chute de la maison Usher (1928).  After an acrimonious falling out with Epstein, Buñuel persuaded Salvador Dalí to collaborate with him on a script for his first film, which was to be financed by his mother.  The starting point were dreams that Buñuel and Dalí had recently experienced and which gave the film its two most striking surreal images: one in which a man cuts open a woman's eyeball with a razor, the other depicting ants emerging from a hole in a man's hand.  For many years, Buñuel had been an ardent follower of Sigmund Freud and Freud's psychoanalytical theories would be the strongest influence on this and many of his subsequent films.  An awareness of Buñuel's profound interest in Freudian psychology is key to any deep understanding of his oeuvre.

One particular work of Freud that Buñuel references frequently in Un chien andalou is his 1919 essay The Uncanny, which explores the idea of something that is both unfamiliar and foreign at the same time and which, as a consequence, causes a 'cognitive dissonance' in the observer, an uncontrollable impulse to reject rather than rationalise.  The severed hand that crops up early in the film exemplifies this concept; only because it is detached from the body does the hand acquire a quality of strangeness that fills us with revulsion.  The slitting of the human eyeball at the start of the film is a more viscerally shocking example; even when the trick is explained to us (the eyeball being sliced is in fact that of a dead calf) we still cannot prevent our stomachs from performing double somersaults as we watch the sequence.  What the film shows us is how narrow and selective our view of normality is - a minute speck of dust compared with what we can imagine.  All it takes to transgress our accepted norms is an unfamiliar juxtaposition of two banal things or ideas.  In a darkly comical vein, Un chien andalou reminds us how parochial and change-averse we are - creatures of habit with a built-in propensity for rejecting new ways of thinking.

Buñuel's loathing for bourgeois conformity runs through much of his work but it is most evident in his first film's most amusing sequence, where the main male character (Pierre Batcheff) is seen dragging a piano laden with decomposing donkeys and Catholic priests; on his back, he carries two stone tablets which are clearly intended to depict the Ten Commandments.  The burden which prevents the character from reaching the object of his desire (the woman he so obviously wants to have his wicked way with) represents those things that most inhibit intellectual freedom and prevent an artist from being able to express himself fully: a Christian doctrine mummified by its empty mystification and a bourgeois culture that has become a desiccated relic, both devoid of true meaning and relevance to the present era.

Buñuel may have been an agent provocateur (with enough bugbears to keep a lesser man in therapy for at least ten life-times), but he had the good sense to know that by making this film he was venturing into dangerous territory.  Legend has it that he was prepared for a full-scale riot at its first screening in Paris.  In fact, the film was an immediate hit and instead of brickbats Buñuel was showered with warm words of praise.  Hailed a masterpiece by some, Un chien andalou ran for eight months in Paris and gained Buñuel and Dalí instant admission into the Surrealist movement.  It also led its creators to receive a commission to make a similar film from the prominent society patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles.  That film was to be L'Age d'Or (1930), an altogether more scandalous work which did create a stir, mostly on account of its more provocative use of Christian imagery.

Buñuel's appearance in the film, in the opening sequence, is significant, and perhaps more so than he himself realised.  (Dalí also appears in the film, as one of the priests being dragged across the floor by Pierre Batcheff.)  As the man who casually slices a woman's eye with a razor, Buñuel establishes himself, at the start of his long and distinguished career, as the fearless iconoclast.  The clinically executed act of mutilation is highly symbolic.  Buñuel wants us to see more than conventional cinema art will permit us, and by slashing an eyeball he opens our eyes to new vistas, new forms of expression and understanding.  Buñuel could well be the first filmmaker to realise just how potent and influential an art form cinema is.  The most important and accessible artistic medium of the 20th century, it has shaped and altered human thought more than any other; perhaps no other invention in history has had such an effect on our perception of the world and each other.  In a sequence that has come to be regarded as the most shocking ever committed to celluloid, Buñuel shows us just how powerful cinema can be, and with good reason.  This is the art form that most effectively blurs the distinction between reality and imagination - the closest we can get to experiencing a conscious dream, a dream fashioned not by our own minds but by someone else, whose motives we cannot even guess at.

It is easy to see why Buñuel was so concerned by the reaction Un chien andalou might receive.  Yet what makes it so daring is not its intentionally shocking imagery but its total negation of the traditional narrative format.  The scenes that make up the film are linked thematically rather than chronologically - one image melts naturally into another, and then another, mirroring the construction of a dream by the subconscious mind.  The association of images is the only logic the film possesses; otherwise, it is a seemingly random series of events, some banal, others disturbingly bizarre, respecting neither time nor space.  Retaining the same setting and characters, the film jumps forwards and then back in time, but the passage of time has no meaning.  A man shoots (a copy of) himself in his apartment and ends up dead in a field, sixteen years before he was introduced to us; the woman who had her eye slit (eight years ago) opens the door to the apartment to escape the same man and finds herself on a beach.  What holds the film together is the ghostly, fractured logic of a dream.  Un chien andalou may be a film that is hard to explain in rational terms but it possesses a strange coherence and a profundity that only great works of literature and music are capable of reaching.  Has there ever been a piece of cinema which evokes so eloquently, and yet so concisely, the neuroses and desires to which we are all prey?  Beware the Andalusian dog - its bite is worse than its bark.

Film Synopsis

One night, a man sharpens his cut-throat razor before using it to slice open a young woman's eye...   Eight years later, the same woman invites a man into her apartment.  She watches as ants emerge from a hole in the man's hand and then resists as he attempts to fondle her.  She tries to defend herself with a lacrosse racquet; he reacts by picking up some ropes and dragging a piano laden with dead donkeys and priests.  The man then wakes up to receive a visit from his doubleganger.  Sixteen years earlier, the man shoots his double dead and the latter dies in a field, his body carried away by a procession of men.  The woman returns to her apartment and encounters the man again.  She goes through a door and finds herself on a beach, where she meets another young man.  The two people appear to be happy in love but when the spring comes they are buried up to their waist in sand, frozen in time...